Digital Camera Quality Passing Film?

smartbit writes "Luminous Landscape writes in their Preliminary Field Report of the Canon 1Ds 11 Megapixel camera: 'the 1Ds produces the best combination of resolution, colour accuracy and low noise that I've yet seen in a digital camera. What about a comparison with both 35mm film and medium format? I'm afraid that film has definitively lost the battle. The 1Ds's full-frame 11MP CMOS sensor produces a 32MB file -- as big as a typical scan. But this file is sharper and more noise free than any scan I have ever seen, including drum scans. There simply isn't a contest any longer.' Kodak's Pro 14n list price is $5000 lower and uses a similar CMOS sensor supplied by Fillfactory "

Comments

Overpriced

[ari_j]

I simply can't afford to take good pictures, no matter the format. No, sir, I'll stick with my Brownie.

Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[qurob]

IANAP (I am not a photographer)

There are so many issues and artificats using a digital camera, even the ~ $1,000 models.

One big quirk I have is the delay. Traditional photography is INSTANT, and at least with all digital cameras I've used, there's a noticeable delay between when I click before it shoots.

Don't even get me started on shiny objects in the sun with a digital camera.

Digital cameras still have incredible value and usefulness if you're a budding eBay auctioneer, or when you take a lot of pictures to put on the computer, and quality isn't the #1 issue.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[joe630]

You haven't shot with a good digital camera. ANd I doubt you've eve used a decent film camera. the delay is about 50ms in the higher end digitals - plus time to focus if you are using auto focus.

I have a high end digial camera (canon d30) and it's as easy to use as the body for my film camera (elan II).

Photos taken with this camera aregood enough to print at 8x10 with very little pixelation, if any.

Film is dead. As a semi-pro photographer, and someone who has been doing it for a VERY long time, I can say: film is dead.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[Pyramid]

"Film is dead. As a semi-pro photographer, and someone who has been doing it for a VERY long time, I can say: film is dead."

Painting is dead. As a semi-pro photograper, and someone who has been doing it for a long time, I can say; painting is dead.

Hmm. Does that sound short sighted and assinine?

What a load of crap. First, lets get one thing straight. You can be no more "semi-pro" than you can be "kind of pregnant". You either are or aren't.

For mass produced, K-Mart style, get 'em in and out type photography, digital as a medium kills film. There is however, the right tool for a particular job. If you wan't to project HIGH quality images or make archival prints, digital looses (don't give me crap about the new epson inks, they haven't been proven and still can't hold a candle to platinum prints).

I guess I should throw out all my vinyl too, huh?

Pyramid

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[ergo98]

Film is dead. As a semi-pro photographer, and someone who has been doing it for a VERY long time, I can say: film is dead.

What a foolish extremist assertion. There is no doubt that digitals have some benefits, but they have some downsides as well:

• It is not a myth: Most digital cameras have a very slow reaction time, including fairly higher end cameras.
  
• Most digital cameras spend a hefty amount of time writing each image to memory. My amateur 35MM shoots 4 frames per second if I want, whereas most digitals can at best shoot a frame every 6 seconds or so.
  
• Image fidelity is far more than simply "number of pixels": Even amongst the best digital cameras there are some concerns about their colour reproduction. With a roll of Kodak film a cheapo 35mm has damn close to perfect colour and linearity.
• Most digitals aren't SLR. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
• Most digitals have fixed lenses. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.

I'm hoping to find a digital camera that convinces me to dump my film habit, but so far it hasn't happened, at least not until looking in the $2000+ range.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[KelsoLundeen]

First, the D30 is not exactly a high-end camera. It might have been two years ago, but now the D30 is decidedly mid-level. It's a prosumer camera, at best.

But that brings up an interesting point -- one that I continue to struggle with. Digital equipment remains a difficult investment -- especially if you're a working pro. Just because a camera is 4/8/11/14 megapixels doesn't necessarily mean it's better than "film" or better than "last year's camera" if you have to pull two or three times the job to cover the cost of the initial investment.

There's no doubt digital is here to stay. And there's no doubt that many folks have proclaimed digital to be "better" than film, but "better" can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. I suspect folks mean "better quality" when they say "better", but I'm not sure what that means either.

I can show you Winogrand photographs taken, oh, in the 1950s that are, in fact, "better quality" than anyone's digital photograph. Anyone's. And Winogrand used a beat-up Leica M4-P without a meter!

I can point to a grainy, dim Salgado print and say, well, that's grainy and dim, but it's "better" than anything I've yet to see reproduced digitally.

Yet I can also point to a hybrid print -- analog film, digital manipulation -- by someone like Gurksy (the guy who makes those massive prints) and say, well, in Gursky's case, the hybrid approach works wonders.

And I can, of course, go to a site like Photosig.com and Photo.net and point to any number -- literally thousands -- of "digital photographs" taken with prosumer gear like the D30 or the new Nikon D100 and say they're absolutely dreadful -- despite the fact they are *crystal clear* pictures of dogs and cats and babies with sticky oatmeal on their face.

So you have a D100 and are able to take crystal clear pictures of baby drool that can be blown up to 16X20?

Great.

The other issue -- much more serious -- is that digital cameras simply won't leave behind the sort of "archeological" records that film cameras leave behind.

This is an unpopular argument, however. Folks always say, well, you can burn whatever you want on whatever medium you want -- CDROM, DVD, you name it.

But as someone who has spent many, many hours in dimly lit photoarchives, I can say without hesitation that if someone like Garry Winogrand shot digitally, there would *be no* Garry Winogrand. Ditto for someone like Cartier-Bresson. They might have one or two great pictures but there would be no beagtives -- only old, outdated media -- most of which (possibly) cannot be salvaged.

Winogrand, for example, had stacks and stacks of prints and negatives in his little NYC apartment. You'd come in for a visit, and he'd toss you a stack of workprints.

His was a "record it all, no matter what" mentality. Now that's both good and bad, but for sifting through an artist's work, I suspect it's bad if you use digital. There's a permanence to a negative which may or may not be the case with CDROMs burned today. There's also a *bulk*. Negatives took up a lot of space. And that fact alone prevented many boxes of negatives from many photographers from being tossed out or misplaced.

Don't underestimate *bulk*. Physical product. In art, it's very important. Maybe not now, not today when the artist is alive and struggling, but when he or she is dead, bulk of what remains -- the presence of his or her remnants -- play a siginicant role in preservation.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[The Madpostal Worker]

One more place where digital is killing film: newspapers.

No longer do you need to develop a roll, look at them on a lighttable, scan a picture in, and then edit it to be used on the page. Now you can just download all the pictures, arechive the ones you want, edit the others, and send it to production. Savings of 30-40 minutes.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[neuroticia]

Newspaper work has very specific requirements. Quality of the print doesn't need to be amazing--no one will be able to tell the difference once it's in the paper anyway. Color doesn't have to be accurate. Time is essential. Etc.

In similar situations, digital will take over (and has taken over) like a firestorm. In other areas like fine art and advertising, the take-over will be a longer process. Film won't die overnight... And I'm hesitant to say it will ever die. There's something about being in a darkroom that makes even the most digital fanatics long for it. It's an artistic magic that doesn't have a digital equivilent. (Unless you start getting into things like 3D.)

-Sara

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[scotch]

Why don't you use that dictionary of yours to look up "semipro" or "semiprofessional",too? MW online shows that term being at least as old as 1900. Like it or not, it's a valid term used in the modern world, your clever but inaccurate "pregnancy" analogy notwithstanding.

Maybe you should step out of your "tiny sphere in which you reside"?

Personally, I don't think film is "dead" either, but what the hell does dead mean anyway? People still use latin, but they call it a "dead" language. Dead used in this context usually means "no longer mainstream", which of course it doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, IMO.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[Wavicle]

The 100 year old photos of your great grandmother are probably black and white photos on fiber based paper. Because that is an archival print process.

If you had color film photos of your kids, 100 years from now those would probably be gone too because color negative film is not archival quality. The only archival color film process that I'm aware of is Kodak's K-14 "Kodachrome" process. It will keep for 100 years in dark storage, but it is a slide film ("color reversal"). The good aspect to this is that in 100 years, provided humans still have eyes, the technology to view this will still exist.

Black and white negatives *are* archival. Black and white prints today generally are not. Resin coated B&W photo papers will not last that long.

Now in defense of digital...

Dye stabilized CD-R's *are* archival. Most CD-R's are not dye stabilized, you have to pay a little extra for those (the non-dye stabilized have an expected shelf life of about 5 years). So assuming something that can read a CD exists in 100 years, digital photos stored in this medium will be available then.

NASA's problem is that they have photos stored on magnetic tape, a process that was known to be non-archival when they implemented it. It can take an hour or more to get all the data off one tape. In comparison a 700MB 80Min CD-R can be read in under 5 minutes.

So, if you want color pictures of your kids to last 100 years, you can:

a) have them transferred to Kodachrome slides (a cost of about $0.50/picture)
b) put them on dye stabilized CD-R (a cost of about $0.01/picture)

Makes digital look like a very attractive option for archival purposes.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[bashibazouk]

Ahh, but take those "great" photos you mention. Would you say the same thing if that artist had made the same image with a digital camera? Your argument seems to go along the lines of: group A did killer photography with film. Group B did crappy photos digitally. Therefore film is better. But it sounds like the composition of the film photographers was better not the technology. Sure you can hold up great photographers to support your case but you forget billions of mediocre shots taken over the same period by lesser photographers as well as JQ public. Give digital time and the cream will rise to the top.

As to the long term storage...lots of early films (as in cinema) are rotting in their light-prof cans. Add a little too much humidity, and negatives will stick together permanently. But a digital file can be copied infinitely. And can be easily copied to the next best data storage format. If you are at all careful, the digital file can be permanent. Something film has never done.

The other part of this argument is that 35mm is not the only format of film. Digital may be ready to take over 35mm but 4x5, 8x10 or 11x14 negatives? I don't think so. Not for awhile yet.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[reflective recursion]

Funny you mention 5.25" disks. I just started a huge backup of 5.25" disks from as early as 1984 or so. Know how easy it was? Just plug the 5.25" drive into the standard floppy connector on my K7 motherboard and the standard power plug on the power supply. You probably wonder how much data was lost due to bit rot. A _very_ slight percentage. Out of perhaps 500 floppies, only 5-8 would be unreadable. And I'd say that those which are unreadable were because the disks were bad to begin with (infact, I remember having trouble reading the same disks 7+ years ago). With today's technology digital backup is a reality. My entire archive of 5.25" and 3.5" (old 720k) disks will fit on 1-3 CD-Rs easily. And later I will purchase a DVD writer, as everyone will, and toss those CD-Rs onto a backup DVD. The process continues and as long as someone is _caring_ for the material, then it will survive.

Archiving is a constant job. If you let paper photographs sit in a damp, dusty, etc. area then you WILL have problems. Same thing would be leaving 5.25" floppies sit around by magnets, etc. Improper care and treatment is the ONLY reason digital, or otherwise, archiving fails.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[Wavicle]

That's a HUGE assumption. Do you have access to something that can read 10 year old 5.25" disks now?

That is a big assumption, but I don't think it is that unreasonable an expectation. About 75-ish years ago someone put video on a phonograph and about 1-ish years ago, someone figured out how to get the video back off.

You can still buy vinyl record players, but if all of them suddenly disappeared from the earth, somebody already figured out how to scan them and reconstruct the audio from that.

There are geeks now who are into high tech ways to work with antique tech, I'm assuming the same will be true 100 years from now. Even if no CD reader exists, somebody will figure out how the data is stored, and come up with a way to lay the CD data side down on a scanner and reconstruct the data from that.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[WNight]

Yeah, painting is dead. Point to the thriving community of professional portrait painter.

Blacksmithy is dead. Fact. There are some blacksmiths, but the industry is dead.

Film is dead. Some diehards will use it, but for all practical purposes 35mm and smaller is dead. MF has been mortally wounded. Large Format's relatives are taking out large life-insurance policies.

Face it, digital provides better pictures than color 35mm film hands down. B&W film has a higher dynamic range, but only barely, and digital can bracket the shot and comine the two pictures for a much higher range.

Semi-pro is generally known as someone who makes money off of it, but doesn't try to make a living from it. If "Pro" is such a hard line, what's the defintion? Anyone who pays all their bills? Anyone who has ever taken money for a picture? Or anyone who shoots as if they were getting paid, regardless of ability to pay the bills? How about someone who makes money with a disposable camera?

And yes, you should throw your vinyl out. Or rather, sell it on EBay, some gullible fool there has been conned into calling static noise "Warmth" and will snap it up. You can either buy the music in digital form or record it yourself before you get rid of it, though a record sounds so lousy you might as well download a 128mbps MP3 for all the fidelity you'll get.

Film VS CCD/CMOS ...

[bani]

... is like vinyl vs CD

Re:Film VS CCD/CMOS ...

[adamjaskie]

When digital pixels can be made smaller than the grains in film and a CCD the size of a negative, then it will be fair to say that digital imaging has overtaken film.

That will take a while. The pixels would have to be able to be smaller than the grains in the finest grained film. I don't know much about colour film, but at least in black and white film, there are several films with grain so fine they can be enlarged to 8x10 or larger with NO grain visible to the naked eye. One way photographers often focus an enlarger is with a "Grain Focuser" which basically magnifies the grain of the image being projected onto the photographic paper. They then focus the enlarger until each grain is sharp. This is much more effective than focusing until, say, a sharp edge in the picture is sharp. Recently, I developed a roll of Fuji Neopan Acros 100. Although I did not dilute the developer when I developed the film, the grain was still so small I had difficulty focusing the enlarger, and this is with 35mm film. Remember there are still cameras around that use 8x10 FILM! An 8 inch by 10 inch ccd with resolution equal to or better than that of good black and white film would cost a fortune to manufacture, and purchase.

Well...it's a step

[Kaz Riprock]

Okay, so if I want a picture inside my computer, I should use a camera rather than a scanner to scan a real picture. That's hardly "film losing the battle" as the post states. That's scanners losing the battle on film's behalf. It's still going to be quite a while before a digital camera can truly reproduce film's quality away from the computer.

This battle ain't over yet

[HawkinsD]

"film has definitively lost the battle..."

Pardon me, but the battle won't be "lost" until the local supermarket starts selling disposable 3M-pixel digital cameras.

Pros and Cons of digital

[Frothy Walrus]

Being a semi-pro photographer, I've considered moving to digital for a while now. Lately I've been getting really close:

* similar image quality, with very expensive digital cameras, to medium format
* zero printing/developing cost
* high capacity for 35mm-quality shots ...but I've resisted so far. I shoot a medium-format Yamica and a 35mm Leica M4P, both dazzling in quality. Digital currently cannot match:

* flexibility in color response and grain afforded by different kinds of film
* quality of final print (photo printers haven't caught up yet)
* artistic manipulation. Photoshop does not count.

Until it's really worth it to blow $10000 on a top-shelf digital, I'll stick with my film.

Re:Pros and Cons of digital

[micromoog]

* artistic manipulation. Photoshop does not count.

Why not?! Digital beats analog on the "artistic manipulation" front by miles and miles, specifically because of Photoshop. What other kind of "artistic manipulation" would you allow, other than software? We are talking about a digital medium here.

Yes, it's true you can do many analog darkroom tricks with chemicals and cardboard circles. But Photoshop does all of those, and many many more, more quickly, more easily, more repeatably and flexibly and cheaply and undo-ably . . . There are some legitimate reasons to argue analog over digital, but image manipulation is not one of them.

Re:Pros and Cons of digital

[BinxBolling]

Ten bucks'll get you three rolls of film. How much for that flash card?

How many times can you reuse those 3 rolls of film?

You realise...

[ThreeHamsWillKillHim]

... that film still, and will always have its advantages. For one, all charge coupled devices (CCD and CMOS) with the exception of one camera (The Sigma SD9) use a pattern of red, green, and blue sensors, tiled. This causes artifacts in the image which must be fixed in software, causing "blurriness" which must be sharpened in post production.

Besides, being a photographer, I still prefer real film, to digital.

Now, A lot of people would argue that digital is good for a lot of low end consumers. I still won't buy that argument either. A lot of digital cameras still suffer from rather severe Chromatic Aberrations, and ccd noise.

And finally, yeah, digital might be getting up to film quality. So what?

The Nikon D100, a "prosumer" digital SLR camera is over $2000, and that's just for a body, no lens. I can get a Nikon F100, the professional Nikon film camera, for half that.

I can also get a Nikon N90, for around $500. Thats a SLR film camera on par with the D100.

See why i'm not excited about digital yet?

bigger isn't always better..

[supernova87a]

11 megapixel may be nice, but it sure is a pain to have to buy a new hard drive for each photo album...

Re:bigger isn't always better..

[karnal]

ummm. I think you got it backwards.

How would it be $7.46 per gig, if the DVD-R is 63 cents?

That's 63 cents for 4.7 gigs. ....

That's (roughly) 13 cents per gig.

Subjective vs. Objective comparisons

[fishbowl]

There are qualities of film which derive from its imperfections and these are not addressed by a strict comparison of the various media based on criteria such as pixel size or color accuracy.

To me, there are also some abstract issues, such as the fact that people take a LOT more pictures today, with digital cameras, than they ever would have done with film. I remember when 3:20 of super-8 film would cost about $4.00, $8.00 to process, and projector bulbs were not cheap.

Also consider the environmental impact of film photography. I cannot stand to even go into the town of Longview Texas, where the Eastman Kodak factory spews the waste products of film manufacturing. It literally makes me ill to breath the "air" for MILES around the plant. They claim their emissions are safe (but nobody should ever have to breathe air that smells this horrible). According to my sources, that town has the highest proportion of ancephalic babies in the country, and it is very common for kids to be ADHD. I can't make a credible correlation, but I can say with certainty that it is not a place where I would ever choose to set foot again.

So, if the digital revolution reduces the environmental impact from film manufacturing, I'm all for it.

There is a question of permanence also. We take digital photographs with no regard to the fact that the formats might be locking us out of access to our own work, or that the storage used is rather ephemeral.

Is there a digital alternative to the sort of photography that would be considered museum quality? How about X-Ray film? Infrared?

Re:FILM HANDS DOWN

[jtara]

Actually, that's not true. Film has a "grain" structure, caused by lumps of silver-halide. The grain is the limiting factor in film resolution.
Film certainly does not provide resolution at the "atomic" level.

The resolution of high-end consumer digital cameras now matches or exceeds that of typical consumer 35mm film.

The biggest advantage that film does have - it will continue to enjoy for some time to come - is dynamic range. You can't even come close with digital. No digital camera - even the most costly professional models - came come anywhere close to the dynamic range of consumer 35mm film and print material - let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print. (And that was the film technology 50 years ago!)

bye bye film..

[RealBeanDip]

This is slightly off topic, but...

For average, everyday people, digital cameras have completely and utterly displaced film. The previous "idiots cameras" the 110's, are pretty much extinct - I haven't seen one in years. This is due to the rise in quality of the 35mm point+shoots.

Now those same 35 point+shoots are being displaced (in mass quanitity) by point+shoot digital cameras. You can get a decent 2MP digital for $200 now, and 128meg of SmartMedia for under $50.

For the average joe-bag-a-donuts, 2MP is PLENTY of resolution.

What I predict you'll see is the continued dropping in price (and increase in capability) of consumer level digital cameras and the eventual exinction and/or price increase (due to lack of demand) of 35mm film, processing and equipment.

Poloroids - I'm surprised they're still in business today.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

[doublem]

National Geographic had an article a while back about the different kinds of film and photography methods used in the magazine over the years. In it they describe the limits of each technology. Much of the film today produces images that can be enlarged to an amazing degree, well past the point where digital images can be sized before pixelization sets in.

The person who posted the article confused the resolution of scanners with that of cameras. The article had the wrong title. It should have been "Digital Camera Quality Passing Scanners?"

The film still has better "resolution" than the scanned images or the digital cameras, it's just that lots of that resolution is being lost in the scanning process.

It is comparable to saying that CDs are of a low quality media because the MP3 your ripped from it is full of noise and pops. You're judging the source based on the merits of a lossy extraction of data from that source.

film comparison

[clarkc3]

Because the title asked if digital camera's quality was surpassing film, I would point this site out which does a great breakdown of the comparisons of the two formats:

http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital .1.html

Need 10-16M three-color samples to rival 35mm film

[Allen Akin]

So Canon's new camera is close, but not quite there yet.

Check out Roger Clark's analysis for the details.

But how about longevity?

[ch-chuck]

My dad was an avid photographer and has a closet full of shoeboxes of 35mm color & b&w slides documenting the family going back to the 1940's and beyond. Most are in excellent condition (except for some ektachrome(sp?) organic dye slides with some mold slowly growing on them). To view them you just hold up to a light or use a fairly simple projector.

Q: If someone takes as many pictures in digital format will they be as easily viewable 50 years from now? Will those inkjet printouts have all faded away, the CD's become unreadable, or no readers available unless you transfer to the latest and greatest digital storage format every 5 years? Will your grandchildren have to hire a data recovery specialist to see their parents 1st birthday party or what Aunt Jane looked like?

Re:FILM HANDS DOWN

[whizzard]

If you were on trial would you rather have a hard photo, or a digital photo?

heh... depends on whether I did it or not

What about long-term storage?

[Torgo's Pizza]

The thing that worries me is storage of all the pictures taken. 32megs adds up over the course of time. Even the current memory cards of today limit you to just a few pictures.

More importantly, how are these pictures going to be stored long term? We have photos and negatives lasting over a hundred years. I'm lucky to have a hard drive last longer than three. The possibility of the great photographs of our day being erased with an accidental click of a button or the failure of a hard drive read head worries me.

If there's one thing that the old 35mm cameras have over the newer digital ones is that we pretty much know how long the images will last over the course of time. How long will it be before we lose our digital pictures because of an unreadable format or digital failure?

Re:What about long-term storage?

[Skyshadow]

I take great pains to backup. I have a 60 gig IDE raid running on my Linux box at home, and I will occasionally (every 4-6 months) burn a bunch of CDs of my important data.

But that ain't a long-term solution. Perpetual admin in the only real way of insuring that my data stays safe, but I consider photos in particular to be important enough to deserve additional safeguards.

So, I have my photos printed (about 40 cents a shot). If they're really good, I send duplicates to my mom, who keeps them in a drawer with the mararoni art I did when I was 3. Pow, I figure I'm at least as safe as film now...

Re:FILM HANDS DOWN

[ausoleil]

As much as digital affacianados would like to say that digital has passed traditional chemical methods of photography, it hasn't happened -- yet. Of course, there are those that will tell tell you that a synthesizer sounds identical to a real instrument.

All that cargo-cult science is all well and good, but I will tell you this as a photographer. Recently, we went to Yosemite National Park, and took photographs with a year old "pro-sumer" camera, a Nikon E-995. Aside it, on another tripod, was my trusty Nikon N90, which is the rough "pro-sumer" equivilant of the E-995. Pictures were made at the same time, with the same relatiove composition in the same light. And the prints from the film that came out of the darkroom had higher acutance and a world more contrast than did the digital, in every single case. Not even Photoshop could make up the difference.

Film indeed has grain structure, and the higher the "speed" of the film, the larger the grains, which gives them more surface area for photons to react faster. Hence, in film, faster film is "grainier" than slower. As for reactions taking place on an atomic level, actually it is at a molecular level.

I am at work at the moment, but once upon a time, I did the math and compared a typical ISO 100 film, T-MAX for example, and counted each "grain" (lump of silver halide) as a pixel. Roughly, according to Kodak's data, a properly exposed and developed T-MAX 100 film would have about 14 mega-grains, or megapixels.

But then there was a major, major rub in the favor of film: there was a huge variance, about a magnitude, in the size of the grains, which seemed to be roughly evenly distributed. This gave the film at least a magnitude of contrast advantage over digital pixels, as the pixels are all the same size.

How to get beaucoup dynamic range in digital

[yerricde]

flexibility in color response

To get increased dynamic range in digital, you can do the following:

1. Take a deliberately overexposed shot to get shadow detail.
2. Take a deliberately underexposed shot to get highlight detail.
3. Composite them in GIMP, Photoshop, or your preferred image editor.

Issue is deeper than quality alone

[peterdaly]

From am amature perspective, I have a 3megapixel Minolta D-Image5 with a 80 MB card.

I routined fly through 100+ photo's in the time I would still be on the first 24 on a role of normal film. Since the card can be rewritten for free, I am not concerned about the costs involved with wasting "bits", as opposed to wasting frames of film, which are of a limited quantity.

Out of a given space of time, I will catch many things on digital I would not have caught on an normal SLR, since film in unlimited and essentially free.

For printing, my Epson 785EXP can print out good enough 8x10 images to be hung. 5x7's come out just as good, if not better than 35mm film from a lower end camera with wallmart printing. It even costs less, since I only print the good ones.

-Pete

Re:Issue is deeper than quality alone

[Apotsy]

Speed is another problem. The article mentions more than 30 MB for a RAW file on the Canon camera, yet it uses ordinary CompactFlash for storage. I shudder to think how long it takes for those files to be written out to the card.

Even with a 3 megapixel camera, I frequently have to wait for the CF card to finish storing the data before I can take another picture. Yes, many cameras have a "burst" mode, with lots of internal RAM to hold the images so that they can be written out to the card later, but even then, there is a limit to how much that write-behind caching can do for you. At some point, the RAM fills up, and you have to wait for the flash card to catch up. With a good 35mm SLR autowinder, you can snap several pictures per second until you run out of film, with no waiting.

I'm not a photographer

[shepd]

But I played one in the highschool darkroom. :-)

We're all talking 35 mm film here, comparing it with specialized, super-expensive cameras.

Wouldn't someone that worried about resolution be using large format film like 8"x10"?

I doubt digital is within overtaking that. I would venture a guess of another 50 years before it can do that.

3 layer CCD

[jeti]

> For one, all charge coupled devices (CCD and CMOS)
> with the exception of one camera (The Sigma SD9)
> use a pattern of red, green, and blue sensors, tiled.

I'm not sure what the Sigma uses. But Foveon has developed
a three layer CCD. The products using this CCD are
hardly affordable at the moment. But Canon is rumored
to also work on this. I'd say that those CCDs will be
standard in a few years.

As an astronomer and an amateur photographer...

[pq]

You realise that film still, and will always have its advantages.

As an astronomer and an amateur photographer, I agree with everything you said, but disagree with your lead-in.

Astronomy used to be done with plates: glass plates with custom emulsions, which would be developed in labs and illuminated for research work. Nowadays, it is all, without exception, done with CCDs. No professional optical telescope uses anything besides CCDs, and it's not just because of advantages in post-processing. CCDs have higher sensitivity, higher dynamic range, and higher fidelity than plates ever did. And yes, they are robust and easy to import into workstations too.

Of course, with CCDs, it helps a great deal if price is (almost) no object, upto a few tens of Gs. For amateur (prosumer) cameras, cost is abig deal, but this is one case where I'd bet on rapid development. The 11MP cameras show that we're getting close: when we get, say, 15 MP cameras for under $1000 (at the level of the Canon A-2 or whatever it is these days), I'll bid a fond farewell to film.

But until then, I agree with you - I'm not excited by digital cameras yet.

Who needs disposable digital?

[mblase]

Pardon me, but the battle won't be "lost" until the local supermarket starts selling disposable 3M-pixel digital cameras.

Photographic film is by its nature disposable -- you can only shoot a roll up once. The whole point of digital film is that you can reuse it endlessly. Even if the technology were that cheap, you wouldn't buy disposable digital cameras because it defeats the point.

Your point about cost is valid, though. The whole reason we still use pads of paper and pens is because tablet PCs aren't economically viable as an alternative -- yet. On the other hand, you hardly ever see people buying or selling typewriters anymore because the advantages of a word processor and printer, even ones that aren't PC-based, far outweigh the added cost of typing digitally.

Polaroid has (or had) a digital camera that bypasses the PC by including a digital photo printer attached to the camera itself, mimicking their longtime instant film while adding the advantages of digital film. Other digital camera makers like Canon have developed small portable printers that can connect to the camera directly for printing 3x5 or 4x6 shots without a PC. Alternatively, commercial digital film developing (and CD-R backups) will become more and more common for people who either want long-lasting film and ink for their photos or don't want to spend the money on their own photo printers.

As these devices come down in price, they'll displace reusable consumer film cameras more and more. Small, cheap digital cameras are $50 and lower today. Most consumers are more interested in quick and dirty snapshots of their friends and family than in high resolutions. Disposable film cameras can't catch enough quality to justify 8x10 blowups of your photos anyhow.

Bottom line: disposable 3M digital cameras aren't necessary to displace film. All that's needed is widespread sales of a 2M, 20-shot digital flash camera for less than $50 and the ability to plug it into a USB cable at Walgreens and get them printed, burned to CD and flushed from the camera's memory for $9.99. If Joe Consumer had access to that, the only thing holding him to film cameras would be the ones he already owns.

From a professional photographer...

[Keighvin]

Make the switch, it's amazing what you can accomplish with digital - as long as you can think as both a photographer AND a geek.

In this sense Photoshop most certainly does count, and eliminates the "Flexibility in color response and grain" per film. You can adjust the grain to your liking, and get a full range of artistic manipulation with a much greater freedom than traditional paper. I've yet to find an effect or filter I can't reproduce in PhotoShop. It even compensates for some lenses, though I'd still keep those handy (as well as a good polarizer - it's much simpler than photoshopping it).

As for quality of the final print, why go photo printer? I've got one (fairly good quality, 2880x1440 dpi 6 chrome) for proof production, but the cost is beat by going to a good development place with a digital processor. Note: MANY DEVELOPERS NOW USE DIGITAL FOR STANDARD PROCESSING AS WELL. It's just easier, and the results are more consistent.

As for $10000 for a top-shelf camera, pick up a 5-6MP for under $2K unless you have do larger than 20x30 frequently, then wait 6 months and get a 10MP for the same price. Photoshop makes smooth interpolations across the board, really, so that may even be unnecessary.

But what about tasting the chemicals?

[docbrown42]

When I was in college, work in the Photo Lab, I knew a guy who could tell if a batch of photo chemicals was going bad by the taste (or so he claimed). With digital, you'd loose that wonderful, dangerous skill. What are you going to do, lick the Flash Card?

(DC, if you read this, get in touch man! It's been too many years...)

The camera body is an issue...

[cmat]

One thing that I usually think is usually overlooked with digital cameras is the fact that when you pick up a 5,6 even 10 megapixel digial body, that's the max resolution that THAT BODY WILL EVER DO. If you need higher quality, you'll need to buy another camera body. Ouch :)

Film SLR cameras are interesting in that the resolution of your photos is determined by the film you put in (which is usually toted as a bad thing(tm) with respect to film photography). So I think that film photography is a bit more flexible in this respect... just my 2cents. :)

Chris

actually, dynamic range must be pretty impressive

[mattorb]

In the past, I have always agreed with the statement that digital cameras would be unable to match the dynamic range of film for a long time. However, I was intrigued by the following comments in the posted review: "Few photographers will find the 1Ds wanting with regard to available dynamic range. I judge it to be about one to two stops better than transparency film, and roughly comparable to colour negative film - but of course much less noisy / grainy."

Now, I am tempted not to take this at face value, because there are good reasons why CCDs should essentially never have the dynamic range possible with film. (Essentially: film responds to light non-linearly, such that x photons hitting your camera does not equal the same amount of "brightness" on your image independent of how many previous photons have been registered. CCDs basiclaly are linear in response -- x photons equals x number of counts, modulo factors of gain, etc. -- up to the point where the number of photons registered is a significant fraction (like say 1/2) of the maximum well depth. Note that film is in this way more like your eye: an object that is twice as luminous does not look twice as bright to your eye, and you can simulaneously see things with your eyes that are many orders of magnitude apart in true brightness. To go even more off-topic in this comment: this is basically the reason why the most common stellar magnitude scale is defined logarithmically, where a difference of one magnitude corresponds to a factor of about 2.5 in brightness; it's an historical relic of the fact that when Hipparchos looked out at the stars, he called the brightest ones "1st magnitude" and some of the faintest ones "6th magnitude" ... and the latter turn out to be about 100 times dimmer than the former. Whew.)

Having said that, though, I don't actually have one of these things, and he doesn't really post any objective backup for his statements about dynamic range, so it's hard to prove or disprove them. He probably does know a hell of a lot more about photography than I do, so I'm sort of tempted to believe that they dynamic range issue is ceasing to be a problem, even if only by careful post-processing and choice of exposure. fwiw.

you can't compare digital and film image quality

[g4dget]

The two media have completely different characteristics and applying 35mm performance characterizations to digital doesn't make much sense. For example, people love to point at the high resolution of 35mm film, but that's only for contrasty images. Digital cameras give you 12bpp or 14bpp even at the highest resolution. If you asked: what is the highest resolution at which 35mm film gives you the equivalent of 12bpp, film resolution would be very poor.

If you don't look at it in terms of numbers, for most practical purposes, in terms of image quality, digital has become comparable to 35mm with the advent of high quality 5 Mpixel cameras. There are still some areas where 35mm is better, but there are already many areas where even a 5 Mpixel camera exceeds a 35 mm film camera in terms of image quality.

Apart from issues of image quality, the immediate feedback of digital, the lighter and faster lenses, greater DOF, and better performance at low light levels mean that you can get many shots with digital that were very hard to get with film.

Re:FILM HANDS DOWN

[MarcoAtWork]

The biggest advantage that film does have - it will continue to enjoy for some time to come - is dynamic range.

I don't buy that: how many stops of dynamic range does slide film have? Not to mention that with digital you can do really interesting things like taking multiple exposures of the same scene and combining them for some really impossible-to-repro-with-film results.

this out for example (check these 5 composite images)

let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print.

you're talking apples & oranges here: those prints have been hand-developed, dodged, burned and so on, you can do the same (increasing apparent film dynamic range) in photoshop and print the results if you so choose.

A master with the film camera, will probably produce masterful digital pics very quickly, if you look at the pictures of the week on photo.net, you'll probably see some stunning digital shots, which would have been just as stunning in shots on film, and sometimes even more so due to the possibilities inherent in a digital imaging workflow.

Just do the math.

[ANTI]

A normal 35mm slide film has around 100 lines per mm.
The size is 24mmx35mm.
That's ~34 million pixel.
Now how can 11M be more than 34M.

The funny thing ?
That's not even important.
Contrastrange with slide film is above 1:1000.
Very good digicam manage around 1:150.
Natures range is around 1:1000000.

So guess what a digicam can do in high contrast situations.

Once a >30MPixel cam is cheaper than my RebelG SLR (~$300) and I can put on high quality lenses.
I might consider it.

Digital?
For ebay pics: Yes.
Anywhere else: No.

Did you do the math?

[Namarrgon]

a) at 100 pixels/mm, a 24 x 35mm image is only 8.4 Mpixel, not 34M.

b) You won't get anything usable from scanning 35 mm film beyond around 4000 x 3000 anyway, with most film stocks - the grain overwhelms the pixel size.

c) The Canon 1Ds (and Kodak 14n) have 12 bit sensors, which gives a dynamic range of 1:4096.

d) The Kodak DCS 14n is built with a standard Nikon SLR lens mount. The Canon EOS 1Ds is compatible with over 60 of Canon's EF lenses.

OK, a decent SLR is a lot cheaper, but it doesn't have any of the advantages a digital camera gives you, either.

I can't believe the hype!

[SheldonYoung]

The replies to this article are astonishing! I seriously can't believe the heresay and outright wrong information can come from a bunch of supposidly smart people. Man, if you don't know your facts, please don't make yourself look stupid.

1. The discussion about how many "pixels" in a 35mm frame are meaningless without context. Do you mean for similar noise levels, the same resolution?

2. Digital images are absolutely archival with proper data management. You wouldn't stick slides in a dusty moldy basement, and you shouldn't leave your images in a 50 year old format on 40 year old CD-Rs. Some film and paper photographic processes are very archival but the majority are not.

3. The contrast range of digital is generally higher than that of slide or negative film.

4. Consumer digital cameras are not the state of the art and you cannot judge the state of the art with them.

5. You cannnot say what someone else needs in a camera. Pros don't necesarily need 6MP or full frame CCDs.

6. If you write, IANAP (I am not a photographer) then stop right there. If someone wrote IANAP (I am not a programmer) in a discussion about the best algorithm for adding two binary coded decimals you would stop reading.

7. Digital SLR bodies handle much like film SLR bodies. No delays, similar ruggedness, etc.

Re:FILM HANDS DOWN

[phliar]

Film is a chemcial reaction with light and a photosensitive chemically treated film. This captures things at the atomic level ...

Sorry. Have you heard of grain? Clumps of metallic silver form; and due to the thickness of the emulsion, many clumps roughly line up to form the shadow called grain.

Good general purpose film properly developed will resolve about 100 lp/mm (line-pairs per millimetre). That's about four orders of magnitude larger than atomic dimensions.